An exploration of garden and food education for children

About KidsDigGardens

This blog will serve as a behind-the-scenes look at the gardening world and the think-tank staff and volunteers that have helped to promote the growing number of community gardens, school gardens, and gardening education programs in Vermont. I will be volunteering with a local organization, Friends of Burlington Gardens, which assists gardeners across the state. In the coming weeks, I will learn how this organization operates – from filing paperwork to shoveling soil. While it’s been an unusually warm winter here in Burlington, it is still winter, which means gardeners are busy readying for springtime planting and making sense of the data from last summer’s programs.

KidsDigGardens is an exploration of teaching garden programs for children. Over the next several weeks, I will be visiting gardens, offices, conferences, workshops, and the web as I learn about community and school gardens, which I will share about here. While this blog will provide some information on how teaching gardens and community gardens operate, it will hone in on the relationship children may build between the garden and the dinner table.

Do kids eat more fruits and vegetables if they have the opportunity to grow those foods themselves? What does it mean to be ‘exposed’ to fruits and vegetables in the garden? How are children’s garden programs facilitated? What have garden coordinators found to be the best and worst methods for encouraging picky children to taste the foods they grow?

This blog will explore some of these questions as they apply to my weekly gardening adventures, but the most important questions on this topic will emerge from my observations. I hope you’ll stay tuned to learn and to add to the conversation.